Given its existentialist themes of alienation and ennui, Albert Camus’s 1942 novella The Stranger is not an easy fit for a film. In 1967, Luchino Visconti directed an adaptation that starred Marcello Mastroianni as the protagonist Arthur Meursault and Anna Karina as his lover. Fifty years on, the French auteur François Ozon has filmed his adaptation of the text. Ozon’s vision is faithful to Camus but updates it with a modern understanding of French colonialism in Algeria, a choice he deemed necessary. “When you adapt,” Ozon has said, “you have to betray.” In addition to austere black-and-white cinematography, archival footage and newsreels express colonial tensions. —Maggie Turner